SCENES FROM THE SAFARI

While I am struggling with the problem of getting my videos off my cell phone and onto my blog, I thought I would post a few pictures and tell the stories that go with them.  Since, for some bizarre reason, I cannot succeed in  uploading more than one picture in each post, I may do a number of these  To start, here are two wild dogs, members of a pack of eighteen.

 

 

There is an interesting story about these dogs.   Wild dogs live and hunt in packs that have a very strict hierarchical structure.  Each pack has an alpha male and alpha female.  When we came on this pack [after some impressive tracking by the guide, following tracks in the sand or dirt], our guide pointed out the alpha pair.  The male had suffered some sort of really horrible injury to its right eye, and the eyeball was protruding from the socket, almost separated from the skull.  His left eye also seemed somewhat dysfunctional.  A subordinate female started harassing the alpha female, and a fight broke out between the two, with the alpha female biting at her to discipline her.  The guide said it looked as though she was trying to mate with the alpha male [and thus displace the alpha female.]  The subordinate female's mate kept trying to stop her from doing this, interposing himself between her and the alpha female, grabbing her ear in his mouth and pulling her away.  She persisted in going after the alpha female, and her mate kept trying to stop her.  There were five cubs in the pack, and they looked seriously undernourished, as though the pack had not been successful in hunting.  Wild dogs hunt by running down their prey, following them until they weary and can be killed.  As we watched the pack from perhaps ten or fifteen feet away, a brief but very vicious fight broke out involving not just the alpha pair and the challenging pair but most of the adult dogs.  After it stopped, we saw that the subordinate female's mate had suffered a fresh wound on the side of his face and was bleeding.

 



When we set out the next morning on a game drive, the guide reported that another Land River had come upon the pack and found that they had killed an eaten an impala, which is not much food for eighteen dogs, but was at least something.  When we found the pack again, more fights broke out, and we saw that one of the other subordinate males had lost part of an ear overnight, suggesting that the fighting been continuous.  All of the guides were puzzled by what was going on, and our guide said they would have to get together, share their observations, and try to piece together a coherent story.  He thought the pack would splinter, since in its present condition it would find it very difficult to function as a coherent effective hunting force.

This was one of several such on-going "story lines" we observed during our safari.

A BRIEF RESPONSE TO "FORMERLY A WAGE SLAVE"

Although the three comments were somewhat hurried and hence a bit unorganized, the thrust is clear, and it raises a very interesting and important point.  Briefly [since I too am on my way to class -- the first meeting of an Adult Education course on Plato's Gorgias  at Duke University], the natural growth and development of a human being from infancy to maturity is unlike that of animals [with an important caveat to be mentioned in a moment].  The development of the human infant is radically underdetermined by genetic inheritance alone, requiring as well the transmission of a set of behaviors, understandings, expectations, etc. that we can call culture.  An adult human who has never internalized this set of cultural elements is not a "natural man," as Rousseau and others would have it.  He or she is what used to be called a "wolf child," a wild creature radically unable to function successfully and lacking anything that we would recognize as a character or personality.  This is in contrast to the manifest grace and coherence of adult animals.  [The caveat is that we see rudimentary elements of this in animals, which we would expect, since there must have been a slow transformation over many millennia from pure genetic determination to the full-blown transmission of culture.]  Now, this cultural element in human development is unavoidably ideological, in the sense that it encodes components of domination, exploitation, rationalizations of the same, and so forth.  So a pure biology of human development cannot, by its very nature, capture what is distinctively human.

A nifty example of the caveat from my safari.  One day we came upon four lions lying down, which, our guide told us, were a pair of mothers and daughters.  One of the mothers got up and climbed up onto a horizontal branch of a nearby tree.  This is very unusual behavior for lions, though not unheard of.  The daughter then followed the mother up into the tree, but neither of the other two lions did.  The guide said [these guys go out every day of the week, and get to know the lions individually ] that the mother had taught the daughter to climb trees, and he wondered whether the daughter would, in turn, teach her cubs to do the same when she had some.  You see the point.  Here was a tiny bit of non-genetically determined culture being born.

TOM LEHRER

There may be some of you out there for whom Tom Lehrer is an iconic figure, as he is for me.  My son, Patrick, sent me this link to a fascinating story about Lehrer, who is now 86!  If you read the story, I will point out that I was actually in the Physics class at Harvard for which he wrote the wonderful Physical Review, filled with songs impossible to forget [including a bump-and-grind vaudeville number titled "The Definition of the Derivative" with the refrain, "that's what they call dy/dx."]  Lewis Branscomb, mentioned in  the article, was my Physics instructor.  Lehrer appeared at the Freshman Union that same year and sang, among other things, a haunting romantic ballad with the unforgettable line, "The Father, The Son, The Holy Ghost, and you, baby."  Those were the days.

ADDENDUM

 

 

Here is that lion in the grass, by the way.

 

 



MUSINGS ON A GAME DRIVE IN THE OKAVANGO DELTA

While bouncing along across country in an open Land Rover on one of the game drives Susie and I took during our trip to Botswana, I found myself reflecting on the striking differences between that experience and the wonderful documentaries I have watched on television over the years about the wild animals of Africa.  These differences in turn served to remind me of the ideological structure of social reality, a subject I have explored in a number of my writings, most prominently in Narrative Time:  The Inherently Perspectival Nature of the Human World.  Since I am still struggling with the technological challenges of uploading my videos from my IPhone to my computer, and thence to this blog, I thought I would fill the void by sharing my musings.  A few introductory words are called for.

Susie and I spent nine days at safari camps in the Okavango Delta, a vast  flood plain in the northwest quadrant of Botswana.  The camps are quite isolated, both from the larger world and from one another.  All of the major African game animals and predators are present, along with an astonishing number of species of birds.  Each day at a safari camp has the same schedule:  A five a.m. wake-up call, breakfast at six, then into the Land Rovers for five hours of game viewing, broken by bush bathroom stops and a brief morning coffee and snacks break in the bush.  Lunch at 11:30, then four hours of rest time [while the animals are taking cover from the noonday sun and are hard to find], high tea [wine and tasty edibles], and back into the Land Rivers for another three hour game drive, capped by "sundowners," which is to say drinks and snacks while standing next to the Land Rover.  More drinks at 7:30, dinner at eight, and to bed to rest up for another game drive the next morning.  A typical tourist plan calls for three days at each of three different camps, with little six seater airplanes to take you from one air strip to the next.  Typically, you arrive at a camp in time for the afternoon drive and leave for the next camp after the morning drive.  Susie and I skipped one afternoon drive, on a day on which we had been in the bush for nine straight hours.  So, nine days, seventeen game drives.  Each tourist is assigned a guide, who drives the Land Rover and finds the game.  He [there are almost no female guides] stays with the tourist for the entire visit to the camp, and receives a personal gratuity at the end of the visit.  Ten years ago, when we went on a Botswana safari, all the guides were white.  Now they are all Batswanan, and the government runs an elaborate training program that prepares Botswana residents for jobs as camp managers and as guides.  The camps are increasingly eco-friendly, with some of them now entirely solar powered.  Basically, each camp is a luxury hotel and restaurant combined with a game viewing program.  Most of the clientele are American [60% these days, down from 80% a few years ago], with the remainder either European or Australian.  The camps are rated at three levels of luxury, with the Premier camps fully as posh as a world class hotel.  This is definitely not a vacation for the masses.

A Land Rover full of tourists does not present to the wild animals a gestalt that is recognizable either as prey or predator, and as a consequence, one can get quite close to the animals without either spooking them or provoking them to attack.  But they really are wild, and the guides issue stern warnings about standing up in the vehicles, talking too loudly, or -- God help us -- getting down out of the vehicles.  On a number of occasions, we drove to within ten or fifteen feet of a lion, who looked at us, sized us up, and went back to whatever he or she was doing.  But had I  stepped out of the Land Rover, I would immediately have been prey, which is to say toast.  At one point, we spotted a huge bull elephant and wanted to trail along after him, but the guide pointed to the secretions dripping from glands on the sides of his face, and said he was "in must," which is to say looking to mate, and hence was very, very dangerous.  We drove on.

The experience of a game drive is nothing at all like the wonderful wildlife documentaries that I so love.  The photographers who make the documentaries spend thousands of hours in the bush with their huge zoom lenses and high powered cameras at the ready, waiting for that magical moment when the cheetah races across the plain after the impala, or the pride of lions take down an African buffalo.  They capture seemingly impossible close-ups of lion cubs playing or hyenas snarling at wild dogs over a kill.  Then they go back to their laboratories and carefully select and edit choice bits from their endless hours of film into fascinating narratives.  They name the animals they film to humanize them and combine footage of many different animals taken on many different days, confident that their audience will not really be able to distinguish one kudu from another, one baby elephant from another.  What they produce is not false.  The pictures are all real.  But it is stylized and organized into stories.  Each documentary has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Each sequence has a visual frame, with certain events highlighted and centered, others sidelined.  The sequences are narrated, so that our attention as viewers is prepared, focused, and guided to the significant moment in each segment.

A real game drive is nothing at all like that.  The exciting moments, if there are any, occur without warning, and may happen at any time in the drive, even immediately on leaving camp.  Indeed, since the camps are open to the bush, and the animals are free to wander through the camp, the best sightings may occur in camp.  The day we arrived at our second camp, we were a bit late for lunch, so we went directly to the veranda where the meal was served, without first stopping at our luxury "tent."  An elephant in search of marula nuts wandered up to the veranda as we were about to sit down for some food.  Here is a picture of Susie on the deck, with the elephant behind her.  This is not some tame circus elephant, you understand, but a for-real wild elephant.

 

 



Over the course of a five hour game drive, there is a lot of time when nothing at all is happening.  Then, in quick succession, you may see some impala [which are everywhere], a family of wart hogs, a journey of giraffe [isn't that a great word?  A journey of giraffe is a large group of giraffe], and a leopard in a tree.  One day, as we pulled out of camp, we saw a large male lion lying in a field right next to the camp, his huge head raised to catch the early morning sun. 

 

The experience has no narrative structure, no beginning, middle, and end, no crescendo to a climax.  The animals are not acting out a story line, they are simply existing.  After a lion kills a kudu and feeds at it for an hour, she just wanders off under a bush and lies down to sleep.  The experience has no meaning, no moral, no highlights, no dénouements.  It just is.

Unless you subscribe to one or another of the various religious creation narratives, this is the character of the natural world.  It has no narrative structure, no meaning, no heightened moments of special significance.  But the social world is necessarily different.  Because it is a collective human creation, shaped by the ideological rationalizations of those who dominate and by the utopian aspirations of the dominated [to adopt Karl Mannheim's useful categories], it is inherently perspectival, shaped by human meanings.  The natural realm encountered on a game drive has no inherent meaning, but the social world of those who go on the game drives is necessarily fraught with social meanings.  The men and women who work at the safari camps speak English because the rich clients whom they serve are for the most part Americans.  When a young Batswanan woman working at the camp hands a tourist a plate of food or a towel, she touches her forearm with her other hand in a gesture of deference characteristic of the Africans of Southern Africa, a gesture that in traditional Southern African cultures is an expression of respect that the young show to the elderly and the poor to the rich.  One of our guides explained to several of us that the British had brought to the people of Botswana many valuable things as colonialists, including English, which all Batswanan children study from first grade.  Good radical that I am, the speech made my skin crawl, but there I was, taking advantage of, indeed relying on, the ability of my guide and all the other workers at the camp to speak my language.

At this point in my musings, we came upon a male lion feeding on a kudu, and I set about recording the moment on my IPhone.  Even a philosopher can be captivated by Nature, red in tooth and claw.

 

 

 

 

 

AS I WAS SAYING

I am back, after a twenty-eight hour voyage on everything from a tiny bush plane to a Boeing 737 -- exhausted, totally discomfited by jet lag, but full of stories to tell.  It will take me a while to catch up.  In the Johannesburg airport, I passed the time by deleting 375 unwanted emails.  Now, I must reply to the important twenty-five, reflect on the comments on my Piketty posts, compose an appropriate report of my safari, and prepare to start teaching the Gorgias in the Osher LifeLong Learning Institute at Duke the day after tomorrow.  Now I must figure out how to incorporate into my blog the pictures and videos I took with my remarkable IPhone.

Tomorrow I shall offer a meditation on the safari experience, connecting it to some observations about the ineluctably ideological nature of social reality.  [What did you expect, a travelogue?]

THOMAS PIKETTY CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CONCLUSION

After 470 pages of dense data-driven analysis, full of truly appalling information about the unequal distribution of wealth and income in the modern world, we come at last to Part Four of CAPITAL in the Twenty-First Century, to which Piketty gives the title "Regulating Capital in the Twenty-First Century."  These one hundred pages were a big disappointment to me.  After everything I had read, I expected Piketty to come out swinging with a series of radical proposals for the thoroughgoing reformation of capitalism, if not its replacement by a new social and economic order.  Instead, we get a discussion of taxation, followed by a utopian proposal for taxing world accumulations of capital.  To summarize his recommendations in a sentence:  Picketty offers reasons for thinking that taxation on incomes is not likely to halt or even slow the steady growth of patrimonial capitalism, and opts instead for a "global tax on capital."  He appears to be aware of the impossibility of instituting such a global tax [who on earth would administer it?], but he writes as though he thinks that something might be accomplished, to start, in the European Economic Union.  He has little or nothing to say about what might be done with the money raised by this tax, were it to be imposed.  [He has in mind perhaps a 1% annual tax on wealth.]

Why this complete disconnect between the trenchant power of Piketty's analysis and the feebleness of his proposals for action?  It is not enough to say that he is an economist, not an activist, for he is what the French call a man of the left, and his life choices constitute a rejection of the isolation from reality that he decries in the American academic world.

I am tempted, I admit, to trace the weakness of Piketty's proposals for change to a biographical passage [which I have been utterly unable to find, after hours of searching, but which I swear I read!]  Piketty tells us that his parents took part in the Paris student demonstrations of 1968, but that he was born afterwards [in 1971] so that he is free of the Marxist [by which he seems to mean Stalinist] baggage of those times.  [Please, please, if anyone knows where the passage is, tell me.  It is driving me nuts.]  Those demonstrations had a profound effect on the very geography of Paris.  In the part of Paris where my little apartment is, the wonderful old cobblestones were ripped up and the streets were paved over so that future demonstrators would not have the materials for barricades ready to hand, while the Sorbonne, home territory to the rebellious students, was broken up into a number of branches and scattered all over the city, on the theory, I suppose, that this would discourage revolutionary activity.

Piketty has an extremely curious relationship to Marx.  He has clearly read him, he refers to him frequently, and yet he cannot stop explaining why Marx has nothing important to teach us about capitalism, or indeed about capital.  Here is an extract from the six page Conclusion that closes the book:

"The inequality r > g implies that wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages.  This inequality expresses a fundamental logical contradiction.  The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor.  Once constituted, capital reproduces itself faster than output increases.  The past devours the future."  [p. 571]

With a few adjustments in jargon, that passage could have come straight from the pages of Das Kapital.  Indeed, omit Piketty's weak, rather hesitant Part Four, and the entire impressive massing and analysis of data in the book could be viewed as an overwhelmingly powerful confirmation of Marx's dark vision of capitalism.  And yet, Piketty shrinks from such an identification, dismissing Marx's theories as inadequately grounded in the available data and motivated by political concerns rather than economic insight.  What is going on?

I honestly don't know, but  I am going to hazard a guess, based on hints I find in the text.  This portion of my remarks must be taken with even more than the usual helping of salt, because in addition to lacking any formal training as an economist, I also lack the sort of immediate familiarity with the French academic and intellectual scene that would help me to place Piketty in his intellectual milieu.

As we have seen, the object of Piketty's greatest concern is the re-emergence of patrimonial capitalism, of a capitalism dominated by those who have inherited their wealth rather than acquired it themselves.  Many passages suggest that Piketty sees this as a question of fairness or social justice [there is even a footnote reference to Rawls at one point].  But another specter is haunting Piketty, the specter of destabilization.  The threat of destabilization appears in the Introduction, where Piketty writes that "if the rates of population and productivity growth are relatively low, then accumulated wealth naturally takes on considerable importance, especially if it grows to extreme proportions and becomes socially destabilizing. ... Accumulation ends at a finite level, but that level may be high enough to be destabilizing."  [p. 10]  Several pages later, he writes, "The second conclusion, which is the heart of this book, is that the dynamics of wealth distribution reveal powerful mechanisms pushing alternately toward convergence or divergence.  Furthermore, there is no natural, spontaneous process to prevent destabilizing, inegalitarian forces from prevailing permanently."  [p. 21]   And two pages further on, "there is a set of forces of divergence associated with the process of accumulation and concentration of wealth when growth is weak and return on capital is high [i.e., when r is significantly greater than g  RPW]  This process is potentially more destabilizing ... and it no doubt represents the principal threat to an equal distribution of wealth over the long run."  [p. 23] 

Nowhere in the almost six hundred pages of this huge book does Piketty ever tell us what he means by "destabilization."  There is a tiny clue on page 472.  "The main reason why the crisis of 2008 did not trigger a crash as serious as the Great Depression is that this time the governments and central banks of the wealthy countries did not allow the financial system to collapse and agreed to create the liquidity necessary to avoid the waves of bank failures that led the world to the brink of the abyss in the 1930s."

The brink of the abyss.  Considering how bad things were in the '30s, what would have been so much worse as to qualify as an "abyss"?  The only thing I can suppose Piketty has in mind is a political revolution.   I cannot be sure because he never tells us, but I think the destabilization Piketty fears is a political uprising, outside of the usual procedures of democratic government, fueled by popular outrage at the extreme inequality of inherited wealth that he labels patrimonial capitalism.

Now, let us remember.  Piketty is a man of the left, an advisor to the French Socialist Party and to its 2007 presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal.   It is surely not democratic socialism that Piketty fears, at least not the rather tepid version that now passes for socialism in France.  My speculation -- and it really is only that -- is that Piketty fears a right-wing uprising, a revanchist resurgence of the fascism that always lurks below the surface in modern Europe.  [Just today, as I have been writing these words, I read that in local elections, the far right National Front party of Marine Le Pen has won upset victories in ten or eleven towns over the socialist candidates.]  We on the left here in America have never had a viable nationally competitive socialist party [although, to be sure, my grandfather won election on a socialist ticket to the New York City Board of Alderman in 1917 -- our family's proudest day], so we may long for an uprising from the left.  But we have also never suffered a fascist putsch.  Well, as I say, this is all just speculation.

What do I think about the economic inequality whose history, tendency, structure, and lineaments Piketty has so brilliantly portrayed?  Let me close this lengthy review by offering some observations, some suggestions, and some alternatives to Piketty's global tax on capital.

Piketty's central discovery, if we may call it that, is that contemporary capitalism is over the long run steadily transferring huge quantities of wealth from the poor to the rich, reconstituting thereby the inherited or patrimonial privilege and power characteristic of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  This fact may come as a surprise to professional economists, but it does not particularly startle those of us who have squandered our youth and idled away our maturity reading Karl Marx.  All societies exist for the purpose of transferring wealth from those who create it -- the poor -- to those who do not -- the rich.  The academic professions exist for the purpose of rationalizing this transfer, the churches exist for the purpose of blessing it, and the arts exist for the purpose of decorating the transfer so as to make it as charming as possible [even though this often comes to nothing more than putting lipstick on a pig.]

In the early stages of the development of capitalism, capital, which is to say the accumulated and unconsumed product of past labor, is owned by those who manage its deployment for new production of goods and services.  But as capitalism evolves, the structure of capital changes.  The ownership of the capital remains private, but its organization is progressively socialized.  [Once again, I must refer readers to my paper, "The Future of Socialism," archived at box.net and accessible via the link at the top of this blog.]  The essential work of the management of capital is separated from ownership and placed in the hands of a cadre of professional managers [Piketty's "supermanagers," among them.]  Modern multi-national corporations are marvels of the rational organization of capital.  Their ownership, as opposed to their management, is dispersed among countless shareholders, who may well be wealthy individuals but may as well be pension funds of public employees.

Piketty's little inequality, r > g, conceals a vitally important truth.  The rate of return on capital, r, is in part determined by the share of the annual product that goes to wages for those whose labor creates that product.  Regardless of the fantasies of marginal productivity, invented to provide a quasi-mathematical excuse for the exploitation of the working class, there is nothing to stop a society from deciding collectively that the entire annual product of the economy shall be divided into one portion saved to create new capital, a second portion set aside to pay for social services and activities, and a third  portion paid as wages to the individuals engaged in one way or another in the production of the annual output.  Included in the second portion will of course be pensions for those no longer working, education for those not yet working, health care for those who need it [including those unable to work], and any other public undertakings democratically decided upon.  None of the annual product need be reserved as "profit" for those who hitherto have successfully asserted legal ownership of the society's accumulated capital.  In short, every society, including ours, has a real and continuing need for capital, but our society no longer has any need at all for capitalists. 

How on earth can we transform modern capitalist society into a society without capitalists?  After all, as good old Marx reminds us, "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

Well, I am about to depart on a two-week safari, so I will politely defer a full answer to this little question until I return [hem hem]. 

 I remain enlightened by Piketty's book, educated by it, helped by it in thinking about the evolution of capitalism in America, and disappointed by the timidity of the concrete steps he proposes to address the threat of growing entrenched economic inequality.  But that just means that we here in America have work to do.  I urge you all to get a copy of CAPITAL in the Twenty-First Century and read it carefully.  I believe it will repay the effort.

When I return from my trip abroad, if there is sufficient interest, I shall be very happy to continue discussing the many issues raised but not resolved in this extended review.